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May 14, 2005
Mumbai's Shanghai 'extreme makeover'
A film clip on BBC World today makes for compelling viewing. In a bid to project itself as the next Shanghai, with all the glitz and prestige that goes with being one of the world's leading commercial centres, the Maharashtra state government is attempting to clean up the city's image by forcibly removing slum areas. My Indian friends reliably inform me that this sort of thing happens periodically, and that this particular 'backyard blitz' has been on the cards since the Maharashtra assembly elections in October of last year. It was at this time that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went on the record as saying that the government would transform Mumbai into another Shanghai by 2010 as part of a larger plan of urban renewal.
According to a recent report by the Indo-Asian News Service, 60 percent of Mumbai's 16 million people are living in slums, and over 90,000 'hutments' have been bulldozed since last December, specifically those constructed after 1995 (those erected before this time are protected by law). The problem is that, once these dwellings are flattened, the owners are rendered homeless, leaving them to compete for space along with the 1,000 migrants coming from poor states to Mumbai every day looking for work. Tragically, real estate prices in Mumbai are so exorbitant, even people with reasonable incomes are forced to live in slums. Urban renewal is obviously desirable, but a forward looking government might be seeking to address the cause of overcrowding in metropolitan areas rather than the symptoms. In the meantime, it is probably a good idea to rehouse people before knocking down their current homes! As for emulating Shanghai, on the basis of my experience there a week or so ago, the Maharashtrans might consider looking for alternative models. The congestion on the roads was just as bad as Mumbai, and the air quality a lot worse (as the picture taken from my PDA reveals below).
Air pollution in Shanghai, April 2005
Posted by jeremy at May 14, 2005 12:07 PM
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